One of the applicants for the .kids gTLD has asked ICANN to stop the planned last-resort auction.

DotKids Foundation is competing with Amazon for .kids and, because the two strings were ruled confusingly similar, with Google’s application for the singular .kid.

ICANN last month set a January 25 date for the three contenders to go to auction, having unfrozen DotKids’ application back in October.

DotKids’ bid had been put on hold due to it losing a Community Priority Evaluation — which found overwhelmingly that the organization did not represent a proper community — and its subsequent appeals of that ruling.

But the foundation now says that its application should be treated the same as .music, .gay, and a few others, which are currently on hold while ICANN waits for the results of a third-party review of the CPE process.

DotKids filed a Request for Reconsideration (pdf) with ICANN yesterday, immediately after being told that there were no plans to put the contention set back on hold.

Tomorrow is the deadline for the three applicants to submit their information to ICANN to participate in next month’s auction.

An ICANN last-resort auction sees the winning bid being placed in a fund for a yet-to-be-determined purpose, as opposed to private auctions where the losing bidders share the loot.

The growth of the worldwide domain industry continued to slow in the third quarter, according to data out today from CENTR.

There were 311.1 million registered domains across over 1,500 TLDs at the end of September, according to the report, 0.7% year-over-year growth.

The new gTLD segment, which experienced a 7.2% decline to 20.6 million names, was the biggest drag.

But that decline is largely due to just two high-volume, low-price gTLDs — .xyz and .top — which lost millions of names that had been registered for pennies apiece.

Excluding these TLDs, year-over-year growth for the whole industry would have been 2.5%, CENTR said. The report states:

Over the past 2 years, quarterly growth rates have been decreasing since peaks in early 2016. The slowdown is the result of deletes after a period of increased investment from Chinese registrants. Other explanations to the slowdown are specific TLDs, such as .xyz and .top, which have contracted significantly.

The legacy gTLDs inched up by 0.2%, largely driven by almost two million net new names in .com. In fact, only five of the 17 legacy gTLDs experienced any growth at all, CENTR said.

In the world of European ccTLDs, the average (median) growth rate has been flat, but CENTR says it sees signs of a turnaround.

CENTR is the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries. Its Q3 report can be downloaded here (pdf).

Temporary slowdown of the dynamics of the .pl domain market, observed from the beginning of the year — decrease in the number of new registrations — should be perceived in the light of extending the selection of attractive names as well as a growing number of new generic domains and increase in competition in the global domain market.

The renewal rate overall was 62.22%, a slight increase on 2016 but still on the low side for an established TLD. However, if you exclude third-level registrations (under .com.pl and .net.pl for example) the rate was a much more respectable 76.37%.

There were 203,898 new domains registered in the third quarter.

The vast majority — 93.96% — of current .pl domains are registered to Polish registrants, with registrants from Germany, the UK and the US also contributing to the total.

New gTLD registry Radix says that three of its larger TLDs have seen a 77% renewal rate two years after launch.

The company said today that .online had 75% renewals, with .tech at 78% and .site at 81%.

It appears to have carved out these three from its portfolio for attention, ignoring the rest of its portfolio, because they all went to general availability in the same two-month period July and August 2015.

The renewal rates are for the first month of GA. In other words, 77% of the domains registered in the TLDs’ respective first month have been renewed for a third year.

Radix, in a press release, compared the numbers favorably to .com and .net, which had a combined renewal rate of 74% in the second quarter according to Verisign’s published numbers.

It’s probably not a fully fair apples-to-apples comparison. Domains registered in the first month of GA are likely higher-quality names registered by in-the-know early adopters, and therefore less likely to be dropped, whereas .com and .net have decades of renewal cycles behind them.

Radix also said that 86% of domains registered during the three TLDs’ sunrise periods and Early Access Periods are still being renewed, with .tech at 92% and .site at 88%.

Amazon, Google and a third applicant are scheduled to fight for control of the new gTLDs .kid or .kids at auction.

It’s the first ICANN gTLD auction to be scheduled since a Verisign puppet paid $135 million for .web in July 2016.

According to ICANN documentation, .kid and .kids will go to auction January 25, 2018.

The winning bid will be added to ICANN’s quarter-billion-dollar stash of auction proceeds, rather than shared out between the applicants.

Even though two different strings are at stake, it will be a so-called “direct contention” auction, meaning only .kids or .kid will ultimately go live.

Google, the sole applicant for .kid, had filed String Confusion Objections against .kids applications from Amazon and DotKids Foundation and won both, meaning the three applications were lumped into the same contention set.

Unless DotKids has a secret sugar daddy, it seems probable that the internet will next year either get a .kid gTLD operated by Google or a .kids gTLD operated by Amazon.

DotKids had applied as a “community” application and attempted to shut out both rivals and avoid an auction by requesting a Community Priority Evaluation.